SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge has ruled that secretive FBI demands for customer data from banks, phone companies and others are unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled Friday that so-called national security letters are unconstitutional because the FBI bars recipients from disclosing to anyone, including their customers, that they received the demands.

Illston says this gag order violates freedom of speech rights.

The San Francisco-based judge put her order on hold for 90 days so the U.S. Department of Justice can appeal.

The FBI made 16,511 national security letter requests for information regarding 7,201 people in 2011, the latest data available. The FBI uses the letters to collect unlimited kinds of sensitive, private information like financial and phone records.

(NaturalNews) If it seems as though the FBI is making a large number of terror busts these days, maybe it’s because the agency itself is at least partly responsible for hatching the plots. That has some political observers wondering if the FBI’s strategies are making the best use of the nation’s limited counterterrorist resources.

In recent months, FBI agents have arrested suspects who were planning a range of terrorist attacks, from shooting Stinger missiles at military aircraft to driving vanloads of explosives into crowded events. But these amazing cases might not have ever been made if the FBI itself wasn’t themselves planning the attacks.

A number of these cases were profiled recently in a New York Times op-ed column, which noted that the so-called plots were devised by an agency that seems to be operating as if the nation is so devoid of legitimate threats that it needs to manufacture some in order to seem relevant.

Withstanding legal scrutiny, but still questionable

Consider the case of Oregon college student Mohamed Osman Mohamud. He thought about using a car bomb to attack a well-attended, festive Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland. The FBI gave him a van packed with inert explosives consisting of some real, but inactive, detonators and six 55-gallon drums, along with a gallon of diesel fuel. An FBI agent even drove the van. When Mohamud called the cell phone number that was supposed to trigger the explosion, nothing explosive happened, except that he got arrested.

Was Mohamud seriously considering such an attack prior to the FBI involvement? If so, could he have put it together by himself? Was he working with someone else the FBI doesn’t know about who is more of a legitimate threat?

It’s hard to say. Obviously Mohamud was at least having bad thoughts, and that’s disconcerting in and of itself (though not criminal). But if the FBI had not manufactured an attack, would he have gone through with anything?

Mohamud’s case is far from the only one manufactured by the FBI, and it is certainly not the only one that has held up in court. In fact, such operations are not only legal but they are a common counterterrorism tactic employed by the agency in the post-9/11 world. Terror defendants most often try to claim entrapment, but they also most often lose because the law says as long as they showed at least some intent to commit a terrorist act, even if tempted to do so by undercover agents, they are guilty.

In his testimony, Lumpert stated that of the 3 pieces of hand-made prototypes MST-13 Timer PC-Boards, the third MST-13 PC-Board was broken and [he] had thrown it away.”In his Affidavit, certified by Officer Walter Wieland, Lumpert admits having committed perjury.

“I confirm today on July 18th 2007, that I stole the third hand-manufactured MST-13 Timer PC-Board consisting of 8 layers of fibre-glass from MEBO Ltd. and gave it without permission on June 22nd 1989 to a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case,”

Lumpert wrote. (The identity of the official is known.)

It did not escape me that the MST-13 fragment shown [at the Lockerbie trial] on the police photograph No PT/35(b) came from the non-operational MST-13 prototype PC-board that I had stolen,” Lumpert added.

“I am sorry for the consequences of my silence at that time, for the innocent Libyan Mr. Abdelbaset Al Megrahisentenced to life imprisonment, and for the country of Libya.“

In just seven paragraphs, the Lumpert affidavit elucidates the longstanding mysteries surrounding the infamous MST-13 timer, which allegedly triggered the bomb that exploded Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie on December 21st 1988.

In the months following the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, someone discovered a piece of a grey Slalom-brand shirt in a wooded area located about 25 miles away from the town. According to a forensics expert, the cloth contained a tiny fragment – 4 mm square – of a circuit board. The testimony of three expert witnesses allowed the prosecutors to link this circuit board, described as part of the bomb trigger, to Megrahi.

There have been different accounts concerning the discovery of the timer fragment. A police source close to the investigation reported that it had been discovered by lovers. Some have said that it was picked up by a man walking his dog. Others have claimed that it was found by a policeman “combing the ground on his hands and knees.”

At the trial, the third explanation became official. “On 13 January 1989, DC Gilchrist and DC McColm were engaged together in line searches in an area near Newcastleton. A piece of charred material was found by them which was given the police number PI/995 and which subsequently became label 168.” (more…)